The Thin Black Line Dividing Britain; The Queen Mother was dead, the

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 7, 2002 | by Trevor Royle

These facts make her life more than ordinarily interesting and they deserved to be recorded, even if in the longer term she will end up as little more than a footnote in the history of the period. As a young girl she married into royalty when it was respected and liked and she lived to see it severely downgraded. Her life began in the high noon of an unshakable Victorian belief that God was in his English heaven and everything was right with the world and she ended it at a time when the instiution of royalty was under fire. That makes her a strangely transitional figure and one whose life deserves to be recorded, for so much of her personal story was also her country's history.

Shake the kaleidoscope, though, and the other variegated aspects of her past create a different image. By all accounts the Queen Mother liked a party and was good company, she enjoyed horse racing and was generous with her drinks, she tied a mean fly, those who knew her socially loved her, she was kind to dogs and children and she was rich in friends. Also, as an icon - all matinee hats, blue rinses and chintzy dresses - she helped her increasingly dysfunctional family when the going got tough. Things might have been bad for the royals with their messy divorces and sexual shenanigans but we've still got the dear old Queen Mum, Gawd bless her!

Then there was the blitz and the part she played in it. Of course she was pleased that Buckingham Palace had been bombed: not only did it allow her and King George VI to look the East End in the face but it put a stop to the mutinous behaviour which had been brewing up in areas of London where the bombing had been real enough for weeks on end. Besides, as one critic pointed out last week, the Queen Mother might have been brave enough but her courage was nothing compared to the pluck shown by thousands of ordinary women who had to queue for food, or lead their families into air raid shelters or wait for long hours in hospitals or railway stations.

Inevitably, amid the praise for the Queen Mother's many virtues, there was also comment about her luxurious and privileged lifestyle. Not all of it was kind or gracious but it reflected a growing mood that the monarchy is anachronistic and irrelevant, that it is approaching its sell-by date and that if it wants to survive it needs to change. In his dim way Prince Charles seems to understand that, but because he genuinely loved his grandmother, seeing in her perhaps a bulwark against his insensitive father, his words about the Queen Mother will crowd out any thoughts of slimming down an institution which is crying out for a new direction and a fresh sense of purpose.

This is not the voice of untimely disrespect but a reasonable request to put the Queen Mother's death into historical perspective. The world of black ties and sombre music has long gone and, through its profligacy and its capacity for denial, royalty itself does not command the respect it once did. These days reverence has to be earned not accepted as a right and surely there is no place for such an expensive and top-heavy royal household with its privileges and its army of ludicrously named courtiers. Yes, the Queen Mother's passing was a sad moment for a family, one in which the nation wanted to share, but the stark fact remains that she was an old lady, full of years, whose life was largely irrelevant to most people in Britain.